Magic Leap is developing ultra-thin silicon optical chips

via:博客园 time:2017/9/7 9:00:57 readed:372

Color butterfly wings contain "ultra-material" and can improve the optical display, used in ultra-thin silicon optical chip research and development.

Mixed Real (MR) company Magic Leap, a very mysterious start-up company. Lei Feng network learned that Magic Leap recently with the United States Berkeley Lab (Berkeley Lab) co-published an academic paper, suggesting that Magic Leap is studying the direction. The team develops new materials that can absorb light from more angles and complete redirection with minimal loss. Although using waveguide technology similar to HoloLens, the technology not only optimizes the MR headphones, but also achieves breakthroughs in holograms, invisibility cloaks, and so on.

Although Magic Leap did not explicitly state that they would use the technology in the MR headset, but Lei Feng Wang think Magic Leap exists this idea. As we all know, the use of waveguide technology, the light field chip can be light to the user's eyes. Magic Leap describes the light field chip: the chip is a three-dimensional wave component, the structure is very small, and can manage the photon flow, and ultimately produce digital light field signal.

Magic Leap is a peculiar way to project a composite image onto a chip and to reflect it to the eye with minimal loss and more precision. To do this, you need to use the so-called "ultra-material", the use of nano-materials unique to the nature of refraction light. The material of the metamorphic material is similar to the colored butterfly wings, and the material that forms the butterfly wings itself has no color but has a tiny feature that can refract the light into a specific color wavelength. Anti-reflective paint glasses and the scientific principle of this metamaterial the same.

According to Berkeley's research, Magic Leap has developed two new ultra-thin silicon optical chips. As shown in the above diagram, the use of electron beam etching technology will be 20 to 120 nm & ldquo; beam "carved into silicon chips. As we learned in high school physics class, the formation of an infinite "diffraction grating", the beam can be diffracted into a different color, like a prism refraction.

In the previous design, in order to ensure high efficiency diffraction, the light must enter the surface at an appropriate angle and diffuse only with infrared light. At present, the technology has been optimized. "We are now able to get silicon chips from different angles and wavelengths," says Stefano Cabrini, director of nanotechnology at Berkeley Labs. "There is no significant reduction in diffraction efficiency." Moreover, the technology can be widely used in the manufacture of chips.

These devices may be used in Magic Leap's unpublished glasses. Berkeley Labs said the latest technology will be used in many areas, including smart surfaces, data processing, holograms and invisible cloaks.